In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell introduced us to the so-called “10,000 hour rule”. Most people took this to mean that if they spent 10,000 hours’ practising something, they’d become an expert in that field. Although Gladwell didn’t say this specifically, it turns out to be – at best – an oversimplification.
According to Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, the academics upon whose work Gladwell’s assertion was based, you need to have a modicum of natural talent to begin with if you’re going to be world class at something. This applies as much to playing in the Premier League, as it does to being a concert pianist. If it only required determination and practice, then surely we’d all be tinkling on the ivories at Carnegie Hall, or earning bazillions playing the beautiful game.
Of course, being academics, their research goes far deeper than this. Not only do you need the potential to be the best (violinists, in the case of their study), but you also need to spend varying amounts of time (much more or much less than 10,000 hours), focused on improving something specific (free-kicks, for example).
The same, you’d assume, applies to public speaking. And in a way, it does. It takes a certain amount of innate talent to speak like Barack Obama or Tony Robbins. But whereas no amount of graft is going to get the majority of us anywhere near the level of Pele or Rachmaninov, I truly believe you can become a decent speaker if you’re prepared to put in the hours. And if you keep working at it, you’ll continue to improve.
Yes, it takes more than that. You need the right words, you have to inject your personality. When necessary, you’ll need to improvise. Yet even the best speakers – from celebrities to your favourite newsreaders – rehearse. That’s why they make it look so easy.
Take Arnold Schwarzenneger. His acting skills may be questionable (except when playing a cyborg), but his bodybuilding bonafides were never in doubt. And not just because he was built like a Tyrolean tank. “I really learned to never do anything that you’re not really prepped, overly prepped for,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2018. “Just like in bodybuilding, don’t go in the competition if you haven’t done the reps.”
Or, to put it in academic terms, here’s Ericsson and Pool with the final word: “Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.”